Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Day 1 Reflections

Today, we attended three plenary sessions by professors at the Ntu-Flagship Program

For the first planetary session,Professor Kerry Sieh, Director, Earth Observatory of Singapore presented about Earthquake Research at Sumatra. The professor explained about how powerful earthquakes coud be, and how they caused islands to rise from underwater because of an earthquake islands and making them 'drown' before an earthquake occurs. This is due to the indo-australian tectonic plate in the ground of Sumatra. This will create waves underground and cause volcanoes to erupt and earthquakes to happen, and thus translates to possible tsunamis. Lastly, it has been proven that forecasting earthquakes is possible.

The second session is about IT for Animation presented by Prof Seah Hock Soon. i have learnt that innovation, science and technology is very important in animation. Also, people not only focus on nice looking animation but also focuses on the story telling.I believe that this is quite true as I can relate with anime that I watch, I would only watch it if the story is interesting and the way they tell it is nice. There are two types of animation, 3-Dimensional and 2-Dimensional. 3-D movies are more cost effective than 2-D animations and are now created more often. Also, less labour and resources are needed for 3-D animations.

The last planetary session is about Nano-science and Nano-technology presented by Associate Professor David Butler. We were thought about how nano technology works and its application in the real world. An example of this is, anti-scratch BMWs. Such inventions will impact people and really benefits us.I would buy cars with anti-scratch bodies if I had the chance to. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Another way nano-technology can help us is carbon nano tubes, which can be metallic. This material is really strong, and is very helpful in many situations

To me, what sounds interesting about this project is being able to use huge machines to test how strong materials are and because I like to explore different materials.

I think I can learn how different characteristics of the material affect what the strength of the material is. This will then help in finding suitable materials to use for architectural designs.By Zahid Afiq S201